Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTime may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish ’twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
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Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






